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Households hold vastly heterogenous amounts of wealth when they reach retirement, and differences in lifetime earnings explain only part of this variation. This paper studies the role of intergenerational transmission of ability, voluntary bequest motives, and the recipiency of accidental and intended bequests (both in terms of timing and size), in generating wealth dispersion at retirement, in the context of a rich quantitative model. Modeling voluntary bequests, and realistically calibrating them, not only generates more wealth dispersion at retirement and reduces the correlation between retirement wealth and lifetime income, but also generates a skewed bequest distribution that is close to the one in the observed data.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, discusses several factors affecting wealth inequality: rates of return on capital, output growth rates, tax progressivity, top income shares, and heterogeneity in saving rates and inheritances. This paper studies the role of various forces affecting savings in quantitative models of wealth inequality, discusses their successes and failures in accounting for the observed facts, and compares these model's implications with Piketty's conclusions.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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In the U.S., both taxes and old age Social Security benefits explicitly depend on one's marital status. We study the effects of eliminating these marriage-related provisions on the labor supply and savings of two different cohorts. To do so, we estimate a rich life-cycle model of couples and singles using the Method of Simulated Moments (MSM) on the 1945 and 1955 birth-year cohorts. Our model matches well the life cycle profiles of labor market participation, hours, and savings for married and single people and generates plausible elasticities of labor supply. We find that these marriage-related provisions reduce the participation of married women over their life cycle, the participation of married men after age 55, and the savings of couples. These effects are large for both the 1945 and 1955 cohorts, even though the latter had much higher labor market participation of married women to start with.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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Since 2009, China has been undertaking an ambitious program of health system reforms. Comprehensive reforms were defined in five priority areas: basic health insurance, health service delivery at grassroots level, essential public health service, an essential drugs program, and public hospital reform. After more than a decade of implementation, these reforms have led to notable achievements; however, challenges remain. The government of China tackled these health system challenges in its Thirteenth Five-Year Plan, the implementation of which was supported by a USD 600 million China Health Program-for-Results between 2018 and 2022. This was one of the first Program-for-Results financed by the World Bank in China and globally. Program-for-Results finances a subset of activities in a broader government program and uniquely links disbursement of funds directly to the achievement of specific program results rather than inputs as in traditional investment projects. In this Program-for-Results, there were three key results areas, aligned to the objectives of the government health reform program: (a) drawing on the reform model in successful pilots to deepen and mainstream comprehensive public hospital reforms; (b) strengthening primary health care services through establishing patient-centered integrated care; (c) addressing cross-cutting dimensions of the policy, institutional, and financial environment, such as information technology, to support the health reforms. This report showcases four case studies of innovations that summarize key lessons and experiences in the implementation of reforms under the Program-for-Results in the two provinces. The selected innovations are drawn across the three results areas of the Program-for-Results and shed light on tackling common health system challenges. The complexity of the health system in China and ambitious nature of its health system reforms combine to set the tone for the case studies, which provide opportunities for in-depth, multifaceted explorations of complex issues in the real-life health care settings.

Health insurance.

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Households hold vastly heterogenous amounts of wealth when they reach retirement, and differences in lifetime earnings explain only part of this variation. This paper studies the role of intergenerational transmission of ability, voluntary bequest motives, and the recipiency of accidental and intended bequests (both in terms of timing and size), in generating wealth dispersion at retirement, in the context of a rich quantitative model. Modeling voluntary bequests, and realistically calibrating them, not only generates more wealth dispersion at retirement and reduces the correlation between retirement wealth and lifetime income, but also generates a skewed bequest distribution that is close to the one in the observed data.